Fifteen Minutes
by catiepie182002
Summary: Drake had been one of his reasons for aspiring to go to Yale in the first place, and he darn well wasn’t going to be one of the reasons for Josh not to go as well.


_Disclaimer: Drake and Josh and its moments of sitcom-y goodness do not belong to me._

_Author's Note: I consider this light slash. It can be read as gen, but it played out as slash in my head, so voila! Also, Josh took the steering wheel for a while, and this didn't end the way I intended. Oh Josh._

Fifteen Minutes

By Catherine A. Graham

In the fall of his senior year Josh learned appreciation for what he now considered to be mankind's finest stroke of genius: the common application. He wasn't sure which school he wanted to attend, and Josh had never been one to close off any of his options prematurely, so he didn't see anything wrong with the fifteen or so applications he was sending out. Sometime during the past summer, his decision had become harder than he had previously thought it was going to be, but that was to be expected, he supposed. This was it, _the _decision of his thus far uneventful – save for the occasional escapade of cop outrunning, money laundering, or vicious dog escaping – life. Every second-place science fair, every nearly missed chemistry test, it all came down to this. Everything about college seemed easier from a distance, but up close, he felt like _he_ was the one being held under a magnifying glass. Would he be good enough? What was good enough for him? What worried him most though was that his biggest question really had very little to do with himself.

By the fifth grade, Josh had had his heart set on the Ivy League, he remembered. His grandfather had given him one of those flags – pendants, he called them now – that you hang on your dorm room wall, dark blue with the word _YALE_ embroidered in white, for Christmas that year. Josh didn't have a dorm room, so he had hung the little flag on the inside of his desk so that everyday when he opened it, the flag would flop down merrily to greet him. _This, _Josh would remind himself, closing the desk and arranging his #2 pencils in order of sharpness, _this place is where important people come from. _

Josh might not have been important in the fifth grade hierarchy; he might even have been a nerd who'd gotten grapes stuck up his nose in front of the most awe-inspiring boy in the fifth grade. And wow, if the fact that he thought of another boy as 'awe-inspiring' wasn't confusing, nothing was. To be fair however, Drake _was _awe-inspiring, calm and confident and graceful and quietly outgoing and just about everything else Josh's awkwardness prevented him from being. The whole grape thing had been a misguided attempt to be just a little like Drake, just enough like Drake that the other boy would notice him for just a second. But other fifth graders, even Drake, didn't care about Yale. Drake didn't know Josh existed (except he did now, because who could forget a chubby little kid with grapes stuck up his nose anyway?), but none of that would matter because while Drake and his stupid, confusing, awe-inspiring self was here, _everything else _was at Yale.

So he didn't really know what had come over him when he actually opened the letter addressed from San Diego State instead of just throwing it in the ever-growing pile on the kitchen table. It was a _state school _for heaven's sake – he might as well just tell Dad and Mom to keep his bed here at home open and hope someday he'd make assistant manager at the Premiere. He'd wake up every morning and see Drake still drooling on his pillow (because who was he kidding, to think Drake would get a job?), and one day Drake would become that guy, that trying to be a bad-ass rocker on MTV, and when he came to see a movie Josh would serve him his popcorn and Mocha Cola, and it'd be just like fifth grade again. Without the grapes, of course – he'd learned his lesson the first time with that one. And that was when he realized: he could do that and be happy. He could wake up every day and go to work at the Premiere with Helen yelling, "Hey Josh, get that mop bucket and clean up whatever's on my shoe from Theatre Four," as long when he came home, Drake was there, as long as when Drake needed him, being a phone call away also meant being a fifteen-minute drive away.

It wasn't fair, in Josh's opinion, that somehow even this, this one thing that was _his,_ had become about Drake as well. Josh hadn't meant for his life to become this constant revolution around Drake, but there it was. Drake had been one of his reasons for aspiring to go to Yale in the first place, and he darn well wasn't going to be one of the reasons for Josh not to go as well. So Josh told himself, as he mailed off the application to San Diego State, that this was his safety school, just a precaution in case Yale and Harvard and Stanford and the 12 others he'd applied to turned him down.

Drake, Josh knew, thought of him as the world's next Albert Einstein – if Drake actually knew who Albert Einstein was – just because he could name all the noble gases and knew the difference between Pluto the dog and Pluto the planet, and assured him that any school in its right mind would accept him and that he had nothing to worry about. This made Josh irrationally angry because every time he just needed Drake to be _Drake – _just completely arrogant, self-absorbed Drake – he had to go and remind Josh that all the girls who were in love with him weren't just interested in the way his hair fell over his eyes when he cocked his head.

As it turned out, for once Drake was right. Well, except for Yale, that is. 14 acceptance letters and one that began with: '_We regret to inform you that our applicant pool has grown in past years, and we are no longer able to accept all qualified applicants.' _Waitlisted. It hurt, not as badly as he thought it would, but still quite a lot, considering that it was his grandfather on his mom's side who had given him the pendant. Yale was his alma mater and following in his footsteps would have been the last tie to a part of Josh's life he'd lost touch with the day he'd called Audrey 'mom' for the first time without flinching inside.

Drake found him in their room, still clutching the letter to his chest and sprawling over most of the couch, as he was wont to do when a situation called for sprawling. Drake looked at the letter, and Josh saw the light of recognition in his eyes (and this was one of those moments when Josh really doubted that Drake was as dumb as he seemed, or maybe he just cared about Josh enough that it overshadowed his usual cluelessness, because it mattered so _much_ that he remembered what this meant to Josh). "C'mon Josh. Everyone knows Yale is an overly selective school with a stick up its ass and a penchant for boys dependent on Daddy's money," Drake told Josh, smiling in a way that said he was only smiling because he wasn't sure which facial expression to make (and it frightened Josh that he knew Drake's face well enough that he could recognize that smile), "Those guys could never handle someone as cool as you anyway."

Drake flopped down on the quarter of the couch left to him and Josh could feel relief, like neither of them had really breathed since he had sent out that first application back in October. When Josh opened his arms, Drake buried his head in the crook of Josh's neck like there wasn't a moment that hadn't always been like this, like they hadn't always known it would end this way. _I'm sorry, _Josh could feel Drake say, although he wasn't doing anything except breathing a little unevenly, _I'm sorry because I'm glad, because this is what I wanted all along, and even though I didn't ask, I always wanted to. _It was classic Drake; Drake was selfish, and then he was sorry, and it was hard for Josh to completely dislike anything about Drake. Drake's weight felt comfortable in Josh's arms – it always had, even in all those fleeting or not entirely consensual or born out of fear hugs in the past – the familiarity of it making him realize that maybe wanting to be a fifteen-minute drive away from Drake wasn't entirely without his own interests at heart.

And suddenly, it was like he'd never _really _wanted to go to Yale at all.

The decision was easier than Josh had previously thought it was going to be. He signed San Diego State's intent to enroll while listening to Drake quietly strum chords that sounded suspiciously like 'Makes Me Happy,' and it felt right, like his hands fitting Drake in all the right places. He didn't bother trying to tell himself that it was because San Diego State had offered him a full ride scholarship and a place in their honors' program, that it was because he knew his parents weren't rich and the financial burden was something he couldn't place on them (although this was what he told his parents for the time being, and it wasn't entirely without truth, since he had spent nights awake worrying about it).

He didn't bother coming up with reasons for what he wanted anymore. Because, he thought as he looked at Drake – with his head cocked to the side in concentration and his hair falling in his eyes like that, he really was just as awe-inspiring as he had been that day all those years ago before Josh had ever known that he could _love _this boy – the school he'd always wanted might have been somewhere else, but _everything else _was right here.

_End._


End file.
